emphasisoncategory

Emphasisoncategory is a term used in information architecture and content strategy to describe the practice of giving heightened prominence to a specific category within a site, collection, or document corpus. It involves design, labeling, and tagging choices that raise the visibility of items assigned to that category without changing the underlying taxonomy.

The rationale for emphasising a category is to improve user orientation and content discovery, support editorial or marketing goals, and guide users to relevant content quickly. By foregrounding a category, a site can direct attention to areas deemed important at a given time, such as a seasonal collection or a product line.

Techniques commonly used include category landing pages with curated shelves, featured banners or carousels, and distinctive color cues or typography to distinguish the category. Category-driven navigation, facets and filters, and descriptive metadata or blurbs also help users locate related content. Implementation often involves templates, widgets, and tagging rules within a content management system, and can be permanent or campaign-based.

Contexts of use include e-commerce, news and media sites, knowledge bases, and digital libraries. While emphasising a category can improve findability and engagement, it may also create or reinforce silos, bias user exploration, and increase maintenance overhead. Effective governance and accessibility considerations are important to ensure that the emphasis remains useful and inclusive.

Example: an online retailer might emphasise the "Home and Kitchen" category on the homepage with a featured carousel, category-specific search results, and optimized metadata. See also: taxonomy, information architecture, navigation design.